Modern software projects depend on third-party dependencies, whose declarations must be maintained as projects evolve. Prior work has focused on dependency version updates, while much less is known about how developers assign dependencies to different roles over time. In this paper, we investigate how developers of JavaScript projects reclassify their dependencies, including removal and role reassignment. By analyzing commit-level modifications to package.json files, we reconstruct dependency role histories and identify recurring reclassification practices. Our analysis of 33,087 JavaScript projects with active dependency maintenance reveals that dependency reclassification is a prevalent maintenance activity, occurring in 79.1% of the studied projects, and accounting for 19.4% of all dependency-maintenance commits. Of these projects, nearly all (97.2%) remove dependencies at some point, while 38.0% undergo role reassignments across Core (runtime), Dev (development-only), and Peer (consumer-provided) roles. These changes are not always final, as 33.1% of projects later reintroduce removed dependencies and 11.2% exhibit repeated role switching. Reclassification practices also tend to unfold over long periods, with a median duration of 408 days. Illustrative cases further show recurring motivations: batch removals as accumulated cleanup or toolchain retirement; reassignments from Core to Dev, which revise production install scope for auditing or builds; and Peer reassignments that simplify consumer installation or move packages that consumers need not provide into Dev. These findings broaden the study of dependency maintenance beyond version updates, and contribute implications for project maintainers, dependency tools, package managers, and research to support correct dependency role declarations.

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